The Kind of Face You Slash - Day 29: She's In Her Coffin, Laughing Merrily

Perhaps you'll recall the many times this month when I've expressed some amount of displeasure over the sanity-crushing grip the eldritch immensity of Howard Phillips Lovecraft's influence has on modern horror fiction. I haven't changed my mind about that, and in fact I'd rather all influences, whatever or whoever they happen to be, would be shoved more aggressively into the attic rather than set with a proud wink on the desks of horror writers everywhere. I can't change the world, alas, but what I can do is point out other stories by writers who have been influenced by someone who, in my opinion, is more deserving, and has a greater claim, on the souls who toil within the genre than Lovecraft (yeah, I'm sick of him! What of it?!). That writer is, well, look:

It hardly needs to be said that without Poe there would be no Lovecraft, or at least not the Lovecraft we know. This is not to say that the two writers are all that similar, and as for Poe himself I'd appreciate it if you'd allow me to link to this post, and let what I wrote there suffice. The gist is, in terms of modern horror, at least in America, Poe's shadow looms larger than a lot of people, including people who write in and about horror, seem willing to admit. To the degree, I should say, that the existence of editor Ellen Datlow's Poe feels like kind of an anomaly. Even Straub's anthology Poe's Children only really took Poe's name as a symbol in the title -- it didn't look for stories that explicitly absorbed Poe as Datlow attempted here. Striking a note that was slightly worrisome, in her introduction Datlow writes that she told her writers that she didn't want pastiches (fine, good) but "I asked each writer to tell me in advance what work of Poe's was to be riffed on..." Oh, hm, well. Why does a specific Poe story have to be riffed on? Why can't something wholly new be written in his spirit? I don't know, you're asking the wrong guy, but based on what I read for today I can't say that Datlow's choice is giving me a great deal of heartburn.

As far as whose stories I chose to read, I had several options, including a number by writers I'd never covered on this blog before. This normally would have been my preference, but in the end I was too strongly pulled in by stories by two guys, Laird Barron and John Langan, I've dealt with before, more than once in the case of Barron. About Laird Barron's "Strappado," I'd only heard it was a good one, and I've been wanting to ramp up my reading of Barron's fiction, so that's that one taken care of, and as for Langan's "Technicolor" I knew that it dealt in some way with Poe's "Masque of the Red Death," and it was told entirely as a lecture delivered by an English professor. Barron I already liked, but what I knew of Langan's work hadn't impressed me, and I suspect it would be lying to myself as much as you if I claimed part of my interest in "Technicolor" wasn't to see if Langan sprawled face-first into a giant table full of pies after the seat of his pants split in front of everybody. Which...more about how that turned out in a little bit.

Barron's "Strappado" is actually fairly close to being in the spirit of Poe than being a straight riff. Reading this removed from the context of Datlow's anthology, I don't believe I would have automatically made the connection to "The Cask of Amontillado" that comes through reasonably strongly once you know the idea. Still, Barron's excellent story stands firmly on its own two legs. It's told from the point of view of Kenshi Suzuki, a man who's ashamed of his lack of connection to Japan, the home of his parents, and overall has a quietly nervous, not withdrawn, but unsure-of-himself demeanor. Kenshi is nevertheless successful, his vague Hollywood production job taking him all over the world on various junkets, during one of which he had a brief but torrid affair with an Englishman named Swayne Harris. As the story opens, the two men find their paths crossing again in an Indian tourism mecca. After sex, they head out for a night on the town, eschewing Kenshi's suggestion of a popular disco in favor of Swayne's of a more hole-in-the-wall location. Kenshi's discomfort with exploring the fringes of foreign countries is overcome by his inability to assert himself, and much of the rest of the story will find him following along. In the nightclub Swayne picked, the two men find themselves in a group of mixed European high-rollers (including one American, who is of course fat and loud and bigoted, Barron choosing to stick with the tiresome "Ha ha ha we're terrible!" self-xenophobia that I find so obnoxious; also, one of the characters is named Luis Guzman, which, I feel, is a strange choice). Swayne adds to the electricity so far generated by money, booze, and vague hints of sex by announcing that he can get them all into the new exhibit by guerrilla artist Van Iblis. This is a big deal -- Van Iblis's work has been banned in England, and his stuff work is often dark and disturbing and is often of an extra-legal, if not quite criminal -- if you get my distinction -- nature. So like Banksy, essentially, but more likely to be focused on death.

But they all go, and are quite excited during the journey to the hidden away warehouse where the exhibit will take place, a journey which is long enough that it's dawn by the time the two cars carrying the wealthy international group arrives. But Barron gets at something very appealingly specific when he writes:

Guzman and Rashid's groups climbed from the vans and congregated, faces slack and bruised by hangovers, jet lag, and burgeoning unease. What had seemed a lark in the cozy confines of the disco became a more ominous prospect as each took stock and realized he or she hadn't a bloody clue as to north or south, or up and down, for that matter. Gnats came at them in quick, sniping swarms, and several people cursed when they lost shoes to the soft, wet earth. Black and white chickens scratched in the weedy ruts.

Embarking on drunken adventures you soon wish you'd been sober enough to decline (as Kenshi actually wanted to) is universal, although the adventures open to these characters is a bit beyond what most people are used to. Which is not beside the point, I suppose, but given Kenshi's head-down, charmingly shy demeanor, their wealth becomes irrelevant pretty easily, if you choose to make it so. In any case, the "adventure" continues when outside the warehouse, associates of Van Iblis instruct the partygoers to strip naked. They're paired off -- due to an odd number of people, Kenshi is alone at the end of this process -- and two by two, they're ushered into the warehouse. And since Barron is vague about what goes on inside, I'll leave it even more vague by telling you nothing. But, you know, it's not good. However, what makes "Strappado" stand out from other horror stories to which it might bear some similarity (I can't think of a specific one, but "Strappado" does not bowl you over with its originality, nor does Barron mean it to) is that in this case, there is actually room for an aftermath -- typically the aftermath in stories like this is someone feasting on corpses or something, but with "Strappado" Barron is at least a little bit interested in the kind of effect horror can have on somebody, the anger and disgust and even upending of basic personality that can follow. In a very subtle way, Barron's story achieves a greater sense of dread than if it had ended with everybody getting their heads split in two, because in Barron's story, for some people the dread doesn't end. An obvious idea, you'd think, but just as obviously an idea few writers have, or at least had and then didn't reject.

As for Langan's "Technicolor," I...okay, I'll just relieve whatever meager suspense I've managed to build up and say that Langan wins this round. I'm not entirely convinced that he brings his very complicated story all the way home, but he at least comes damn close. And anyway, he may have -- a reread someday will decide that for me. But what Langan pulls off here is fairly extraordinary. I'm wary of overselling this, but when you consider that the story, as I've said, takes the form of a college English lecture, and that I, at least, rarely failed to believe the language used, I could picture the professor, any male English professor I ever had, really, saying these very things (well, up to a point), and was moved by the end to pull my Poe biography off the bookshelf to see how much, if any, of what the professor is going on about was based even a little bit on truth (one important element does seem to have come from Poe's delirium in the hospital shortly before his death), and read, and read, and read on fascinated by the strange alternate partial biography of Poe that Langan was laying out, clueless as to where this was all going, I'm fairly confident has achieved something quite admirable with "Technicolor." And he does that, by the way, with a story that finally feels a bit less like something Poe would have written than fuckin' Lovecraft! But I'm not even angry about that!

"Technicolor" is a hard story to summarize, primarily because I'm loathe to spoil the narrative force of it. Langan very seamlessly carries his story from an interesting analysis of the color scheme at play in Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death," told in a thoroughly convincing impersonation of academic speak, into the shadow inspiration for Poe's classic story, who the man was who inspired it, what the man did that inspired it, what the man was trying to do when he did the thing that inspired it, and where this led, and left, a drunken, tumor-addled, and grief-stricken Edgar Allan Poe in his final days. Langan even drops a throwaway bit of classroom atmosphere that pays off quite fairly later on. All structured like a lecture. And it's no small feat -- one I honestly didn't believe Langan would bring off -- that the language necessary for this premise never drives into a ditch. There's interaction between the professor and his students, and the students' words are not given to us, yet at no point does Langan resort to "What's that you say? You want to know what Poe meant by placing the braziers where he did in each of the colored rooms? Well, I'll tell you..." He might skirt that once or twice, but never goes off the road. Plus, the ending, which I think is fairly strong (if I have an issue with it, it's that for as present as Poe is in this story, there's not much of Poe's specific imagination in the ending) somehow feels even more chilling knowing that it's occurring somewhere as innocuous as a college classroom. Not sacred, mind you, because, well, anyway...no, it's that it's so ordinary and everyday, and I can pull up a vision of one of several versions of that place in my head at any time. This is like the idea of horror being more frightening in daylight, but in this case it's more like horror being more frightening in a barbershop. So I guess you may have had the last laugh, John Langan.

The Kind of Face You Slash - Day 26: The Skullcap of the Beast

Speaking of genre hybrids, as I was yesterday, remember two years ago (of course you do, why wouldn't you?) when I talked about Laird Barron's "The Imago Sequence", a crime/horror hybrid that won me over as I was in the act of writing the post? Well, crime/horror -- or as its practitioners would probably prefer you call it, horror noir, or noir horror -- has become enough of a thing that the ubiquitous Ellen Datlow recently published an anthology called Supernatural Noir (or maybe that's what its practitioners would prefer you call it) devoted entirely to such stories. Having read a bit of it now, I'm quite happy it exists, because just based on my small sample Datlow has drawn from a pool of talent who know what it mean to combine these kinds of stories, as well as these tones, which neither Datlow nor anyone else represented in Supernatural Noir would be the first to point out aren't too terribly far apart to begin with.

It's a nice lineup, in Supernatural Noir. The great Brian Evenson is there, Joe Lansdale (of course), Lucius Shepard, Melanie Tem. Lee Thomas, who I wrote about earlier this month. There's enough here that I could have, and maybe should have, skipped over the already-covered Laird Barron, but I'm finding this year, that I'm continuously drawn towards writers I've given little more than a glancing look in the past, not least because that glance is probably the last time I've read anything by them. Barron is here, with a story called "The Carrion Gods in Their Heaven", and I wanted to read it. It's that simple. So I paired that one off with a story called "But For Scars" written by Tom Piccirilli, who I've never read but who I know of because of his occasional penchant for baroque titles like A Choir of Ill Children, and This Cape is Red Because I've Been Bleeding, a book of horror poetry. From that perspective, as a title "But For Scars" can only be regarded as a disappointment, but boy he sure has a handle on his material.

Of the two, "But For Scars" feels the most like a crime story, while Barron's story feels more like horror. Piccirilli structures "But For Scars" as an investigation, conducted not by a regular cop but by a man on the fringe of society, and in a setting of rampant lawlessness and corruption. "But For Scars" begins with our unnamed narrator waking up in the very early morning to find a sixteen year old girl holding a .22 pistol, fatally overfeeding the narrator's fish. It's an image not out of line in something like, say, James Crumley's fiction, nor is Piccirilli's language:

Men would consider her sexy as hell until she hit maybe twenty-five, and then she'd be downgraded to bruised fruit. By the time she was thirty the neighbors would be saying she hadn't aged well.

The narrator knows the girl -- he's living in what was once her home. Her parents, Ron and Katy Wright, were brutally murdered in the basement, and their daughter, Emily, dealt with the loss in a manner that landed her in a state hospital for six years. It is from there she's just escaped. Our narrator knew Emily's parents very well (Emily asks him "Did you ever fuck my mother?", and while he doesn't answer her, he answers us through the narration: "I had. A lot."), and in fact was and is a part of the same outlaw biker gang as they, and within said gang the murders of Ron and Katy are believed to be an internal thing. Emily wants to know who killed her parents, and she wants to use her .22 on them. He wants to get the gun from her and calm her down and help her. She tries to seduce him, and he, by the skin of his teeth, manages to resist. They fall asleep in his bed, and when he wakes up she's gone. He sniffs the air, and smells something terrible coming from under his bed:

I crouched down and peered underneath and saw Emily wedged there wit her eyes and mouth open. She'd cut he wrists with the pocketknife I kept in an ashtray on my dresser. It hadn't been very sharp and she'd really had to saw into herself.

The narrator had awoken in the first place because he believed Emily had whispered in his ear that she was pregnant, and this, along with her death, fuels his desire to find out what's going on, who killed her parents, who got her pregnant if indeed she was (the narrator seems confident he wasn't dreaming, and I was never clear why) -- all of this leads him to state hospitals and into the lair of the biker gang. It's quite an excellent short crime story, where the supernatural horror is so subtle as to be questionable as that. You don't really doubt that there is something ghostly going on here by the end, because two different characters describe the same phenomenon that neither would have been likely to privately share with the other, but it's interesting that our point of view character never sees anything otherworldly for himself. "But For Scars" is a morbid and sad crime story that has just a hint of...something. Plus, as I write this, I'm asking myself other questions, the answers to which are not provided, and which on reflection add a more visceral horror kick to the whole thing.

But mainly, "But For Scars" is a really nicely written piece of crime fiction, of the currently popular semi-rural type. It's tough, though, and mean. When the narrator is being roughed up by probably corrupt cops, following Emily's suicide, Piccirilli writes:

One detective smacked me with a sloppy open palm. His hand was soft and smelled of aloe. Afterward, he looked like he wanted to apologize. Another cop tried to work my kidneys but he couldn't find them. I didn't know whether to be grateful or disgusted.

Well, that's great, and proves that Piccirilli knows the language of crime fiction. If anything about "But For Scars" is frustrating it's that in just under thirty pages, Piccirilli creates a world that I would love to return to for other crime stories, or, better yet, novels. Forget the barely-there horror stuff, even -- this overcast world of brutal biker gangs in control of a corrput town is a great setting that I fear I won't be reading about again anytime soon.

Laird Barron's "The Carrion Gods in Their Heaven" does not have the same effect, and it's hard to talk about this without sounding like I'm criticizing one story or the other. It's just interesting to me that Piccirilli leaves me wanting more, and Barron leaves me feeling as though I've been given enough, and both reactions reflect well on the stories. I think I know why this is. "But For Scars" is a crime story first, and for whatever reason crime fiction is most effective in novel form. Something about the genre benefits from the long form. Horror, for whatever reason, is precisely the opposite, finding its greatest power in the short story. And, of course, as I've said, "The Carrion Gods in Their Heaven" is a horror story before it's anything else.

It does have a common crime set up. Lorna is on the run from her rich, abusive husband, Bruce, and with Miranda, her lover, she has moved into an old cabin outside of the very small town of Poger Rock in the state of Washington. The cabin is known by locals as the Haugstad Place, and of course the history of the structure, and the bloody past of Haugstad himself, will come into play later. But Miranda gets a gun, private investigators hired by Bruce come sniffing around the place, Lorna drinks a lot, and violence is considered as an end result of all this. As indeed it is, but of a rather different sort.

One day Miranda comes home with a giant animal skin, one used apparently as a cloak, that she'd found in the surrounding wilderness. Lorna finds it hideous, but Miranda becomes more and more attached to it, and her behavior, and desire to be violently proactive in regards to Bruce and his hired guns, begins to very reasonably freak Lorna out:

The pelt covered Miranda, concealed her so she was scarcely more than a lump. She whined and shuddered and took otice of the pallid light, and she stirred, Lorna was convinced that the pelt was not a loose cloak, not an ill-fitted garment, but something else entirely for the manner in which it flexed with each twitch and shiver of Miranda's musculature.

...Lorna's mouth was dry. She said, "Sweetheart?"

Miranda said, in a voice rusty and rugged, "Why don't you...go on to bed. I'll be along. I'll come see you real soon."

So "The Carrion Gods in Their Heaven" is rather creepy, actually, and it moves from there to grotesque, at a level that is nearly Clive Barker-ian. I could nitpick at the concept behind Supernatural Noir as it pertains to "The Carrion Gods in Their Heaven", as it doesn't really feel like Barron wrote a genre hybrid so much as it was realized that the common set-ups for any number of horror stories could double as the set-ups to crime stories, but pffffft. Who cares. This is good fiction. Good new horror fiction, even. And brother, that ain't hay.

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 28: Tell Me Tales of Inconceivable Fear and Unimaginable Love

Clark Ashton Smith began his literary career as a poet, and despite devoting much of his writing life to horror and fantasy fiction, it would have to be said that he remained so by inclination. His mentor was a man named George Sterling, who, when Smith first turned his attention to fantastic stories, applauded his efforts, but said:
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I don't advise you to devote much time to such things...the mind of man begins to smile at anything that is inherently absurd and outdated. Your faculties are far too fine to be wasted on such vacua...
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...You have squeezed every drop from the weird (and what drop!) and should touch on it only infrequently, as I on the stars. The swine don't want pearls: they want corn; and it is foolish to hope to change their tastes.
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Horror fans! We never get an ounce of credit! But, okay, I can't blame him.
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For the above chunk of background, I borrowed liberally from the story notes written by Scott Connors and Ron Hilger, editors of the new five-volume edition of Clark Ashton Smith's collected stories. These are truly lovely volumes put out by Night Shade Books, and have provided me with my first taste of the fiction of Smith, about whom Gene Wolfe has said:
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Let us pause briefly to notice that although Lovecraft has had many imitators (he is in fact quite easy to imitate) and [Robert E.] Howard more than a few, no one imitates Smith. There could be only one writer of Clark Ashton Smith stories, and we have had him.
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So it would seem. Having now read some of Smith's work, even if only the tiniest fraction, it seems very easy to not only trace certain influences, but also more or less coincidental similarities to contemporaries like Lovecraft, Smith's fiction is very much on its own, and the primary reason would be his style. I'll admit right off the bat that I already feel like I'm talking out of my ass, given how little I've read -- the truth is I would have read more, but time was unusually restricted today (I particularly regret not being able to fit in the stories "The Abominations of Yondo" and -- especially, because the title is so striking -- "A Murder in the Fourth Dimension"). Even so, I was immediately struck by Smith's writing, and instantly grateful to Connors, Hilger and Night Shade for refusing to let Smith sink, forgotten, into history, as so many other genre writers, good and bad, already have.
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All the fiction I read today comes from The End of the Story, volume one of this collection, and the main story I read is, indeed, called "The End of the Story" -- a rather curious and interesting title, it now occurs to me -- which, as a piece of plot-work, is very conventional. The reader is told right away that...
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The following narrative was found among the papers of Christophe Morand, a young law-student of Tours, after his unaccountable disappearance during a visit at his father's home near Moulins, in November, 1789...
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Morand's tale concerns his attempted journey home to visit his father. He is waylaid by a storm, and forced to seek shelter at a nearby monastery in the (fictional) region of Averoigne. There he meets a highly gregarious monk named Hilaire, who instantly befriends Morand, offers him food, a bed, and access to the monastery's vast library, which includes "the finest works of heathendom and Christendom, even...certain unique writings that survived the holocaust of Alexandria."
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Not only that, but Hilaire offers Morand -- a young scholar and lawyer -- the opportunity to read "an unknown dialogue of Plato", "two lost tales of Miletus", and so on. There is also a strange little six-page manuscript that immediately sparks Morand's interest, but about which Hilaire says:
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"There is a curse on the pages that you hold in you hand...Christophe, there are things beyond your understanding, things that it were not for you to know. The might of Satan is manifestable in devious modes, in diverse manners; there are other temptations than those of the world and the flesh, there are evils no less subtle than irresistible, there are hidden heresies, and necromancies other than those which sorcerers practice."
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He further implores Morand not to read the manuscript -- comes just short of forbidding him, in fact -- which, of course, makes it far more likely that Morand will read it, which he does.
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What he reads is a short account of the mysterious fate of Gerard, Comte de Venteillon, who, on the eve of his marriage, disappeared -- a point that puts me in mind of Shirley Jackson's "The Daemon Lover". The gist is, in the forest near his home, Gerard meets a "half-human creature with hoofs and horns". Appalled by the image, as a Christian, Gerard demands that the creature speak for itself...
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Laughing wildly in the twilight, the bizarre being capered before him, and cried:
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"I am a satyr, and your Christ is less to me than the weeds that grow in your kitchen-middens...
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"Stay, Gerard de Venteillon, and I will tell you a secret, knowing which, you will forget the worship of Christ, and forget your beautiful bride of tomorrow, and turn your back on the world and on the very sun itself with no reluctance and no regret."
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The satyr does tell him the secret, and Gerard does turn his back on everything, making his way not towards his bride but to the mysterious ruins of the Chateau des Faussesflammes (literally "House of False Flames"). These ruins, Morand believes (correctly), might well be the same ruins he's noticed on a hill near the monastery. And, of course, he's drawn to them himself.
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The evil in this story is as ancient as that found in Arthur Machen's "The Great God Pan", and, of course, it is quite intriguing how Machen's story hangs over so much horror fiction that came after, particularly the fiction I've read this month. Not only are there mysterious satyrs in Smith's forest, but Pan is mentioned in Laird Barron's "The Imago Sequence" ("The panpipes went wild") -- sorry I forgot to mention that one -- Machen himself was referred to in Mark Samuels's "The White Hands", and there is yet more to come. But Smith's belief and reliance on the ancient past for his source of evil seems somehow more genuine -- and don't forget, I really liked all those other stories. Perhaps this is due to Smith's vocabulary. Here, Morand reflects on his desire to visit the ruins near the monastery, despite the warnings that Hilaire has just given him:
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Before he had finished speaking, a resolve had sprung to life full-born in my mind: I felt that I must go to the Chateau des Faussesflammes and learn for myself, if possible, all that could be learned. The impulse was immediate, overwhelming, ineluctable; and even if I had so desired, I could no more have fought against it than if I had so desired, I could no more have fought against it than if I had been the victim of some sorcerer's invultuation.
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This language sounds like it was itself drawn from some ancient spellbook. I mean, "invultuation"? But it works. The language drew me back centuries, or more, to the time of the evil which Morand will soon face (though he won't quite see it as evil).
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In another story I read, "The Epiphany of Death" (another title more intriguing after you've read the story than before), Theolus, the narrator discusses his strange relationship with a man named Tomeron. Tomeron thinks very highly of Theolus, but, while fascinated by him, Theolus's opinion of him is somewhat different:
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Though he fascinated him at all times, there were occasions when my interest was not unalloyed with an actual sense of repulsion. At whiles, his pallor was too cadaverous, too suggestive of fungi that have grown in the dark, or of leprous bones by moonlight; and the stoop of his shoulders conveyed to my brain the idea that they bore a burden of centuries through which no man could conceivably have lived.
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Later, the two enter a tomb where...
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The air was increasingly dank, chill and miasmal; and mephitic shadows crouched or swayed before our torches in every niche and corner.
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I didn't even know what "mephitic" meant until about five minutes ago, but I instantly knew I loved it. And it's such a crazy word, by the way, that even the definition includes the word "noisome".
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I won't describe "The Epiphany of Death" beyond that -- it's a very short story that lives off its own language. If you're as taken with the examples I've provided above, then you probably already know that you want to read it. And, actually, the only other story, if it can be referred to as such, that I read today was a half-page piece of work called "To the Daemon" (there's that word, or rather that spelling, again). It's from there that I pulled the quote I used as the title for this post. One interesting detail about "To the Daemon", and its place in The End of the Story is that it's the only story in the book that doesn't get its own story notes from Connors and Hilger. It's almost as though they don't know where it came from -- perhaps it was found, old and dried out, in an old desk that belonged to Smith, the details of its discovery not unlike Morand's uncovering of the manuscript that sends him to the House of False Flames. "To the Daemon" begins:
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Tell me many tales, O benign maleficent daemon, but tell me none that I have ever heard or have even dreamt of otherwise than obscurely or infrequently.
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Perhaps it's a manifesto.

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 4: We Are Maggots

Apathy breeds apathy. That's a phrase I just made up, and, I freely admit, it sounds pretty stupid. But reading fiction that I've obligated myself to write about, and finding that fiction to be uninspiring makes it twice as difficult to actually sit down and physically perform the act of writing than it might otherwise have been. And to be honest, it would have been difficult enough anyway.

But maybe it's just me. Laird Barron, today's subject, is quite the up-and-coming writer. So up-and-coming, in fact, that his first book, The Imago Sequence, is actually readily available for acceptable retail prices. When you consider the fact that the book is a collection of stories -- never big sellers in any genre -- then you begin to realize that something is up (and, presumably, coming). Novels sell, story collections don't, unless, maybe, if they're multi-author anthologies. But the first book by a genre writer whose work is not distinguished by extreme violence (not from what I've read, anyway)? Who is this Laird Barron character, anyway? The reviews have been very positive (though on the "Reviews" section of his website features an unusually high number of blurbs by one critic -- Nick Gevers of LOCUS magazine -- all of which, as far as I know, could have come from the same review), he's won awards that aren't the Bram Stoker Award (The Imago Sequence scooped up the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Collection), and has developed a healthy cult following.

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(Also, as an aside, on his blog, Barron jumps to the defense of John Langan's Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters, two stories from which I talked about in mixed-to-negative terms yesterday. Apparently, the Langan book has not been embraced by everyone, and Barron wants to "call fools on their foolishness". Having only read two of Langan's stories, all I can honestly say is that I kind of disagree with him, but I also have to admit that I admire Barron for taking the time out to praise another writer's work like that. Maybe the two of them are friends, I don't know, but regardless, it's nice to see that kind of solidarity. And I'm being sincere.)

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So...why did Barron's work leave me so cold? The main story I read is the collection's signature piece, "The Imago Sequence", and the structure of the story immediately perked me up: it's a genre hybrid, you see, combining horror and hard-boiled detective fiction. Another plus, for me, is that it plays this merger straight. Too often, genre hybrids go out of their way to wink at the audience (see another crime/horror hybrid, the made-for-cable movie Cast a Deadly Spell, which I actually did like, but that's beside the point, sort of), and I like my genre writers to take what they do seriously. Which is not to say I want them to be humorless -- Barron knows to keep in the smart-ass patter that is a staple of detective fiction -- but rather that I don't want them thinking genre fiction is all one big silly game. Okay, so Barron doesn't do that. Point to Barron.

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Barron's detective, Marvin Cortez, isn't of the "knight errant" variety favored by Raymond Chandler and John D. MacDonald. Instead, Cortez is a low-level thug and criminal who does a variety of jobs for his shady friends, said jobs occasionally calling for investigative work. In this case, he's been asked by his buddy Jacob Wilson to track down the second two photographs out of a series of three called, collectively, "The Imago Sequence", each taken by an otherwise undistinguished photographer named Maurice Ammon. The first photograph, called "Parallax Alpha", is already in Wilson's possession, and is described thusly:
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Shot on black and white, it detailed a slab of rock, which I assumed was subterranean...I was fascinated by the surreal quality of this glazed wall, its calcified ridges, webbed spirals and bubbles. The inkblot at its heart was humanoid, head twisted to regard the viewer. The ambient light had created a blur not unlike a halo, or horns, depending on the angle. This apish thing possessed a broad mouth slackened as an unequal ellipse. A horrible silhouette; lumpy, misshapen and dead for epochs. Hopefully dead. Other pockets of half-realized darkness orbited the formation; fragments splintered from the core. More cavemen, devils, or dragons.

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The second photograph, called "Parallax Beta" is actually on exhibit in San Francisco, and the third picture, called simply "Imago" is presumably in the possession of a former assistant of Ammon's named Anselm Thornton. Wilson wants Cortez to track down Thornton, and "Imago".

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From there, the plot is tangled enough to allow Cortez to actually need to go about the process of investigating, and the situations he finds himself in are standard for the detective genre. For instance, he interrogates a deviant socialite, currently housed in a mental instituion/country club, who used to know Thornton intimately. The information he receives from her indicates that Thornton is either mixed up in a religious cult, or Left-wing domestic terrorism, or both. As I say, all standard (although, pick your wing on the domestic terrorism angle, because both get regular representation in detective fiction), but also no less compelling for that.

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The kind of twists Barron throws at us to remind us that this also a horror story are cleverly done. In detective fiction, there will usually be one lead, one person that the detective needs to track down who, when he's found, will have a nickle-sized bullet hole in the middle of his forehead. In "The Imago Sequence", however, it's not so simple. This lead's name is Renfro -- and I'll be honest and say that his direct connection to the story escapes me at the moment -- and when Cortez enters his home, expecting, based on certain signifiers, to find Renfro's corpse, he instead finds that Renfro's living room floor has been torn up, and massive hole dug in the earth, and at the bottom...

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There was a lot of debris at the bottom of that hole. A lot of debris and the light was dimming as its batteries gave up the ghost and I couldn't be one hundred percent sure, but I glimpsed an earthen lump down there, right where the darkness thickened. A man-sized lump. At its head was a damp depression which a small object glinted. When I hit it with the light, it flickered. Blinked, blinked.

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It's that blinking, of course, that produces the chill of horror. If that lump is, indeed, Renfro, we expected him to be dead. We did not expect him to not be dead, and only the horror genre can make that the more dreadful of the two options.

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Eventually, Cortez -- who has been suffering bizarre, insect-laden nightmares since he first laid eyes on "Parallax Alpha", and has also been experiencing and dark, otherworldly pull towards some unknown destination that has very little to do with what Wilson is paying him for -- gets an eyeful of "Parallax Beta", and he even finds himself face to face with "Imago".

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And so now how about this: in writing this post, I'm realizing that I liked this story far more than I originally thought I did, or that it at least had a greater impact on me that I'd realized. It's curious, but I began writing this in an apathetic slump, but the jolt of the story's finale is coming back to me, snapping at my brain. I'm now telling myself "You read this story on your terms, and you should have read it on its own terms." A bad move on my part, but I've ended up with an interesting dovetail with yesterday's post, in which I found myself reacting to John Langan's fiction more negatively than I'd thought I would be before I began writing, and today all I want to do is tell you what happens at the end, and ask anyone who's also read the story to jump in and talk about it with me. Because one detail of the story -- that there are three photographs in the Imago Sequence-- turns out to not be a point that is part arbitrary, part convenient plot structure, but rather both, and perhaps symbolically central to the story's ultimate impact. Suffice it to say, Cortez does, in a sense, find "Imago", and we're reminded that there are three photographs. And then you turn back to the first page of this 40-page story, and re-read the epigraph Barron chose to kick things off, a mysterious quote from the poet Wallace Stevens:

Imago. Imago. Imago.

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So this story scratched itself into my brain, and I've just now realized it. Well played, Laird Barron. Well played.

You Can't Stop What's Coming

Since Greg has already been teasing his October project, I figured I might as well do the same. I got some nice feedback last year, but I didn't spend much effort building up to it, which, had I done so, could possibly have enticed new readers to join in. So this year, I think I'll drive the whole idea into the ground before we even get started.
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If you were around here last October, you'll know what to expect. If not, here's a little taste of what you can look forward to...

And much more! Good Christ, so much more. So very, very, very much more...

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Anyway, join me this October, as I wallow in the best and, more than likely, the worst (though I won't be going out of my way to find it) of horror literature. All month, every day. Seriously: every day!